Joe Heschmeyer tackles the tough questions Christians face in a time when trust in institutions is at an all time low. What do we know to be true, especially when we’ve been lied to so much by the world? When does our distrust devolve into sin?
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I cannot go on social media right now without being barrage by people sharing fake news with me. And I don’t mean opinions I disagree with. I mean sharing things that are just factually untrue. It’s everything from a theory that is claiming things that just did not happen or AI generated art. Pictures that the person can’t tell aren’t real. So much of modern life is spent combating not just differences of opinion or perspective, but just outright the battle between truth and error, and this is likely to become reignited in many ways. One of those recently, Donald Trump announced that he was going to declassify all of the records concerning the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and Dr. Martin Luther King. And with all of those, there are different levels of conspiracy theories, people claiming to know what really happened.
And so I was recently asked on Patreon, which by the way, shameless joe.com if you want to join. I was asked on Patreon, what do we make of that spiritually? Because when you have these conspiracy theories about major world events or about really whatever, because we see this in theology, oh, the Catholic church is covering up such and such. We see it in politics. Oh, the government is covering up such and such. We see it even in sports. Oh, the Kansas City Chiefs get all the calls. You thought, I wasn’t going to mention the chief. Come on, I’m wearing red all week. In all of these areas, from the trivial and mundane and playful to the really serious accusations, we find people very willing to entertain theories about reality that are one, contrary to the mainstream narrative, that’s fine, but two, making very accusatory, damning sort of accusations about one’s neighbor. That’s where it’s not fine. So let’s get into that and kind of delve in.
As I kind of intimated, I want to make a threefold distinction because a lot of things get lumped in as conspiracy theories when technically they’re not. So for instance, if you’re someone who thinks, oh, modern Egyptologists are factually mistaken, the pyramids are way older than they appear, they were maybe put there by another civilization or aliens or something like that, that might be wrong, but that’s not by itself a conspiracy theory. That’s just, if you want to call it an alternate history, something like that, fine. If you think essential oils cure cancer, we might disagree, but by itself, that’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s just an alternate approach to medicine. So in this threefold distinction, the first and the most acceptable is just disbelieving the official version of things or the popular version of things. Frequently, the official or popular version is wrong or at least incomplete.
In fact, if you think about the great advances in medicine, say many of them wouldn’t have been made without a bunch of people willing to distrust that we have everything basically sorted out. Likewise, a detective investigating a crime, there are times where it’s really good to have that eye towards, maybe it’s not the way it seems on the surface by itself, not sinful. Where we start to get into more problematic territory is that second tier believing that the official story isn’t just wrong, but it’s actually a lie. It’s part of an intentional coverup that again, can sometimes be true, but we’re starting to get into murkier waters though. It’s not the kind of charge you want to throw out willy-nilly. And then third, the really full throated sense of the word or term conspiracy theory is not just thinking that the official version is wrong, but believing that you somehow have the real story, that the powers that be, you’re trying to cover up the actual truth.
And that’s where you’re on the shat route. Again, unless you have really good evidence, if you’ve discovered the smoking gun document, fine, great. But if it’s just you at home on the internet deciding you know better than everyone else who’s professionally looked into this, you should be extremely hesitant to go to that place just because of the spiritual implication. I’ll get into what those are, but I would be remiss if before addressing where conspiracy theories go wrong, I didn’t acknowledge why it makes sense for them to be so popular right now. To get a sense for their popularity, you have to really go back in time as it were. Imagine briefly the world of the mid 20th century where there’s a tremendous amount of trust in what we call elite institutions in the church, in churches, in Protestant denominations, in every social institution, in businesses, in the government, et cetera, people trusted the powers that be, were leading them more or less well, even if it wasn’t the president you happen to vote for even if it wasn’t your leader.
We see that in the numbers. We see it in the way things are talked about and the way press coverage works. And the problem here, although there’s a lot that’s really good about that, is that this sometimes masked real evil being done. So I want to actually start with a story that I had long thought of as basically presidential trivia before really grappling with how grave and sinful and arrogant this move was. And by that I mean the covering up of President FDRs physical ailments, his ailing health as well as his paraplegia and being confined largely to a wheelchair 1945,
CLIP:
As the global war reached its devastating climax, Franklin Roosevelt was the supreme figure of the wartime alliance, but also a man living on borrowed time. Roosevelt’s health was collapsing sa by chronic heart disease and by two decades as a secret paraplegic, one wartime American general nicknamed him rubber legs. But few Americans were aware that their president could not walk unaided or that he’d been diagnosed as being on the brink of cardiac failure.
Joe:
So in the middle of World War ii, while much of the world is relying upon American leadership, FDR Arrogantly decides to run for a fourth presidential term, which had never been done before. Even though he and those around him secretly know that his health is so bad that he is almost certainly going to die in office, which of course he does, and he waits till the end to even choose a vice president knowing he is individually going to be selecting the president for the country knowledge the American people don’t have. Now, my point here is not that an aging president would never try a move like that today, my point is that when Roosevelt did it, it worked. The media was complicit in covering for him. The other people who consulted with the president, those surrounding FDR, even those who disagreed with him strongly, didn’t sound the alarm and say, Hey, he is really sick.
And oh, by the way, did you know he’s been in a wheelchair for 20 years? It just doesn’t happen. So FDR wins a fourth term. The American people don’t find out that their president is confined to a wheelchair and then he dies. And Harry s Truman, who FDR had kept in the dark even on things like the Manhattan Project, is forced to figure out what to do with this atomic bomb he didn’t know about to someone growing up today, I would suggest that such a world is literally incomprehensible. That would never happen again. That will never happen again. But if you want to understand why things happened the way they did in the 20th century, anything from why are conspiracy theories so popular now to why did so many bad bishops cover up sexual abuse for so long? You have to understand that mindset of putting trust in elite institutions and institutions protecting their image by sweeping all problems under the rug.
This of course leads to the downfall of trust in elite institutions. You have things from Watergate to the sexual abuse scandal that start to undermine, start to crack the sort of public trust in those institutions. But honestly, what changes this in a profound way is not this or that scandal because this is a decline in trust in institutions that we see across the world, regardless of government, regardless of religion. Despite all of those things, we find declining levels of trust for elite institutions outside of dictatorships where I think it’s fair to say maybe trust levels are lower than people are willing to say publicly, but what accounts for that bigger shift then? Because you can’t just blame Watergate for people having less trust in the French government. You can’t blame the sex abuse scandal for people having less trust in the scientific establishment. What’s really going on?
Well, Martin Gry suggests a pretty convincing version. I don’t think this is the full story, but I think this is a major part of it. He’s a former CIA analyst and in his book The Revolt of the Public, he wants to know what changed and why, and he’s following world events all across the world. He’s seen revolutions and everything pop up, and he’s predicting that this is going to happen, that we’re going to see this outpouring of things like the Arab Spring, the outpouring of things like populist movements in the us, UK and France and Italy. He sees all of that stuff coming. Why? Because he notices certain trends in data. Because remember, his job as an analyst was to keep track of what’s going on in the world, and as he puts it, in the early days of his job, he came into the CIA during the Reagan administration.
It was a pretty easy job. There were not a lot of sources of information out there, so you could be well-informed on French politics or whatever pretty quickly. But then around the turn of the century, something major happens in his book, he references this uc, Berkeley study that finds that if you look at all of the information stored on paper, film, optical and magnetic media, that if you were to trace all of that up to about the year 2000, just have that be like one unit. It basically doubles in size over the course of about three years. From 1999 to 2002, the amount of world information doubles and then it doubles again, and it just is off at this kind of exponential curve, that kind of digital tsunami as he puts it. Information tsunami radically changes things because it means we no longer have to go to in the institutions we formerly trusted to find out what to think about a certain issue.
So if you think about the impact that the printing press had on the authority of the Catholic church, people could now say, I’m just going to take the Bible and read it for myself and see what I think it says. We have an equivalent version of that when it comes to what I think about world events, what I think about medicine, what I think about, fill in the blank, here’s how Martin Gury kind of explains. Now we will warn you this is, it’s about a minute and a half long clip. I don’t normally go that long, but I think he does a better job than I could of explaining the impacts of the information tsunami of leading to the downfall of trust in institutions and really paving the way for things like conspiracy theories to take hold.
CLIP:
You have to understand the great institutions of the 21st century, government media and so forth received their shape in the 20th. That was the heyday of the top down. I talk you listen, model of organizing humanity. It turns out that for this model to be tolerated as legitimate, it has to enjoy a semi monopoly over information in every domain. Remember what I said about my early days in CIA information was scarce. Hence, it was extremely valuable. The institutions that controlled the flow of information were vested with authority. They could tell ordinary persons top down what the important public issues were and often how to think about them. The information tsunami has simply swept away the legitimacy of this model. The elites today who run the system are totally demoralized for good reason. They know that their every mistake, their every misjudgment, every failed perception, every failed prediction, every self interested act, every sexual paid will be exposed and talked about endlessly. Today, elite failure sets the information agenda,
Joe:
And again, we see this erosion of trust in institutions across the world and not just in the realm of politics each year. Edelman the world’s largest public relations firm puts out what it calls the Edelman Trust Barometer. It’s an international poll analyzing how much people trust various social institutions, and what they’ve found is a quarter century long decline in institutional trust. Now, it might’ve gone back before that, but they’ve been looking for a quarter century. By 2005, they found that people were trusting their peers more than authorities, and overwhelmingly across the world we find that more than two thirds of respondents today worry that government leaders, business leaders and actually performing the worst of all journalists and reporters purposely mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations. So both the government and the media are ranked as simultaneously unethical and incompetent.
That’s quite a potent combination. But again, that’s not just in the us. Western countries overwhelmingly reported having little trust in government or in the media and the countries that did perform well like Saudi Arabia and China probably did so because people were afraid to publicly criticize the government. Ironically, the Edelman Trust barometer was itself part of the problem of decaying institutional elite credibility when it emerged that Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates are Edelman clients. So they were paying millions of dollars to the same PR group that is putting together a report saying people in their countries really trust them. So trust in elite institutions of any kind is down, but there’s another related problem that might not have thought about. So in this widespread fast-paced information economy, it’s not just that I can fact check whatever I read in the news, it’s not just that scandals are harder to cover up.
It’s also that there is this rush to the press effect. Not only explain what I mean. Last week, Chris cia, a former CNN correspondent or analyst took to Twitter X whatever we’re calling it to do something extraordinary, to admit that he was wrong and Donald Trump was right about the origins of Covid. Now, I’ll tell you right now, I don’t know. I don’t know whether Covid originated in a wet market or in a Wuhan laboratory. I’ve heard good arguments on both sides. I’m not here to settle that for you, but I am trying to diagnose something that I found very striking, and I am not here to beat up on Chris CIA for doing the humble thing and acknowledging that he’d been too quick to trust the judgment of the CIA instead of trusting the president on these issues. Of course, he was also trusting people like Dr. Anthony Fauci, but what’s striking about this is Sia kind of realizes, oh, okay, the problem here was nobody knew what they were talking about.
Remember the twofold finding of people in 2020 and for the last five years is that their governments are both corrupt and incompetent. Not just corrupt, but good at their job, but they’re actually bad at their jobs as well. So in the midst of that, what I think a lot of people are reacting to is there were no COVID-19 experts in 2020. There just weren’t, no one had been around long enough working with it to be an expert in it. And so even the expert class was new to it. They were novices as well. They were more knowledgeable novices, sure, but the problem was a lot of the things they were saying turned out to be wrong sometimes perhaps intentionally lying to people about the efficacy of masks when there was a mask shortage, sometimes unintentionally just because the information is changing at a fast pace.
But as a result, you have a lead institutions saying things wrong and journalists saying things wrong and fact checking when they don’t have the facts in real time, but related to this. So he’s recognizing this problem like, okay, everything was too new and so we couldn’t get our facts straight. Now it is striking, he changes his opinion basically because the ccia a spokesman announced that the CIA had changed its opinion, so he’s still trusting in the elite institutions, but he’s showing why a lot of people don’t, and he’s showing why that is kind of eroded because that rush to judgment, which all of us kind of dealt with during the days of Covid where we had to make a spur of the moment sort of decision, how seriously do I take this? What’s the nature of this virus, et cetera, when none of us had a ton of information about it, led a lot of people, both experts and online to make brazen often false kind of claims.
I’m not meaning to bash the elites or the scientists or any of that. I’m meaning to say there was a pretty limited amount of evidence and evidence was coming in very quickly and people were having to adjust on the fly. I give that actually more of an analogy for the way news in general works because we often don’t think about it this way when there is breaking news. It used to be you had often much of a day to go and figure out all the facts and then put your story together and then it might make it to the morning paper. Right? Now, you often are in a rush of minutes because if you are trying to release something online, if you’re a journalist who is trying to get the clicks, because if you wait too long, if you spend two hours fact checking to make sure all of your T’s are crossed and all of your i’s dotted, somebody else is scooped it, somebody else has already gotten in there, they’ve gotten all the clicks, and your story is now a footnote, you are not getting the ad revenue, you’re not getting the traffic, you’re not getting the reputation.
And so there is this very difficult to overcome problem where there is a huge impetus to try to respond quickly. Look, I will say as someone who has a Catholic channel that is in no way breaking daily news, I’m aware that if I can respond quickly to events, people are more likely to want to watch that and I want to make things people want to watch. So there’s that balance because I don’t want to go so quickly that I’m just doing hot takes, right? Because those are often ill-informed and even mistaken, and you might make the situation worse, but if you spend four years trying to fact check something from last week, you’re wasting your time because no one’s going to care by the time you finish it. So we are in this precarious situation that the information economy right now where there is a massive amount of information coming out, not just to the journalists but to everyone else, and the journalists trying to shape stories are grappling with all of this as it comes to mold narratives that’s assuming the absolute best.
They’re still going to make mistakes and unlike before where their mistakes might’ve been caught by an editor hours before publication, now it’s more likely that mistake is going to be corrected after the fact leading to less trust in the same news sources because you see them being wrong over and over and over again. But I don’t just mean to pick on journalists because this is something I see people doing all the time. The same problem the journalists have of I want to respond to that event and I want to do so in a timely manner, but I don’t know if all the facts are correct. You see this online with less carefulness. To put it simply, for instance, last week there was a really tragic case where there was the airplane collision in Washington DC and immediately within 24 hours, there was a rumor that one of the pilots was a self-identified transgender pilot, and I mean this was clearly malicious bad faith.
There was no evidence supporting this, but they named someone’s name and this person had to go on the news to be like, no, I’m not dead. I was not involved in an air collision accident that is malicious and cruel, whoever originated that, and you can see the kind of rush to publication or rush to judgment that ordinary people engaged in spreading that kind of false story. The other thing that this, to add one more kind of reason why we’ve got this is there’s what’s called confirmation bias. So at this point, anytime I watch a football game, I know that after I go online, I’m going to hear the losing team explain why it was not that the other team was better. It was that the referees were the problem. Now to be clear, referees are imperfect, and now we have a bunch of cameras doing replay after the fact, and sure enough, you can find times where the slow motion camera captures something that a human eye doesn’t in real time.
Sure. So technology has given you access where you can see a mistake someone made in real time, but then this gets added with, therefore it must be a malicious conspiracy against my team and my team only or in favor of the other team and the other team only. We’re going to talk about football one more time. I’m just warning you, but I just mentioned this to say there’s this complicated set of things. There are real reasons why elite institutions have deserved to have an erosion of trust in them. People trusted them too much in the past, and they often abuse that trust. But second, we also have a media landscape where falsehood can flourish because it takes longer to combat the lie than it does to spread the lie. And third lies are often really appealing because they appeal to us at the level of confirmation bias because they tell us, you’re the good guys.
The other side’s, the bad guys, whether it’s the refs, the other team, the other party, whatever it is, we can be very prone to buying into narratives that yes, the other side is they’re bad and they’re malicious and they’re doing all this bad stuff on purpose, and that can be a really appealing kind of narrative. It can also be a really appealing narrative just to think even if there’s a malicious actor, at least all of this is well orchestrated and under control. So those are good and bad reasons. Conspiracy theories flourish. When do we need to worry about them? When do they become evil? I want to give an example of kind of an egregious and fairly well-known one that I think when you watch it again, is striking for another reason. You’ll see why this is the Pizzagate scandal.
CLIP:
One of the big surprises of the presidential campaign was the explosion of fake news on the internet, fantastic tales that some believe to be true.... Read more on Catholic.com